ParentingThe Universal Demand Law makes clear what outcomes to expect from placing demands on anything living.

Parenting is not a popularity contest. Many parents selfishly deny their children the discipline the children crave and the demand they deserve because many parents wish to be popular with their children.

Largely ignored, discipline is one of the most important factors of childrearing. Parents do not like to give discipline for many reasons and excuses. A few of of these reasons and excuses are the following:

1. Disciplining children is a lot of work. But parents get to reap the rewards of that work by less work down the road and well behaved children and children that are better prepared for real life in adulthood and by not having to deal with the consequences of poor behavior.

2. Parents have read some books about child rearing and about the subject of discipline. Many of these books have completely opposing viewpoints on the subject and parents can always find a couple of books that agree with their current practices of child rearing that will totally absolve them from having to apply a very personal and caring approach to discipline or the lack thereof. Different children in the same household need different doses of discipline. Same with pets. If you treat every child or every pet the same you may wind up with very good results with some and disappointing results with others. What is a demand for one child is an over- or under-demand for another.

3. When parents are divorced the discipline problem has a tendency to be worse specially when new family units are formed that have children from different marriages. The easy way out is to defer discipline to the marriage partner that is the natural parent of a child or children. "Spare the rod and spoil the child".

4. Many parents think that teachers at school are responsible for disciplining their children. Teachers on the other hand are no longer allowed to discipline their students. Where in the past teachers were given a lot of authority to discipline students, they wound up with well educated and well behave students. "Spare the rod and spoil the child"

5. Compulsory military service used to be a very good excuse for parents to defer matters of discipline. Military service used to be (and still is to a lesser degree now) a very good influence on many wayward young males. Many lawsuits and the change to mixed gender military service have taken the teeth out of bootcamp and the discipline that could be obtained from the military.

There are more examples of excuses for parents to absolve themselves from their parental obligations of disciplining their children. Children brought up without discipline will have lesser chance of developing good skills in self-discipline. They run into all kinds of "surprises" like teenage pregnancies for girls and drug-abuse for both genders. Low level of respect for others and poor communication skills. Arguments, tempers, fights are very much as a result of the selfish attitudes of parents that witheld the needed discipline that is their duty to give their children.

Some parents think of discipline as requiring physical punishment and they have as their excuse that they have read a few books by Dr.Spock, the infamous child rearing "expert". Dr.Spock apologized later in his life that he had made terrible mistakes in research on the subject of child rearing and he felt a great deal of responcibility for having given misguiding advice on child-rearing to a few generations of parents. A few generations of children were brought up with the non-confrontational methods of child rearing he had advocated in his books. He woke up to the fact that all children are not equal and need different forms and amounts of discipline (exactly as my UniversalDemandLaw.com predicts) to achieve optimal outcomes. He noticed that his grandchildren did extremely poorly under the methods he had advocated for almost two generations. He had formed his opinions with only his own children in mind, and they apparently did not need any more discipline than he had given them.

Some children need frequent and increasing amounts of discipline even to the point of physical spanking, which by this day and age is frowned upon (as an aftermath of Dr.Spock's books and their big influence on the subject) in many countries spanking is even forbidden by law.

In some countries the male children cannot do any wrong in the eyes of society and only the girls are subjected to varying degrees of discipline and often even very harsh discipline. Those countries obviously wind up with a lot of out of control and disgustingly behaved adult males and very much better adjusted females.